Arion.Net is where I post random thoughts once in a while and document some of the projects and hacks I've worked on in my spare time over the years. All opinions posted here are my own and don't represent those of my employer.

Wow. A plate in binary! Uber-geeky. Lets see.. its 7 characters (size limit for plates), so we'll assume there is a leading 0 to make it 8. Now, its 8 bits.. which would be 1 byte.. so.. as a decimal number it would be "83" and as a hex ...

Ugh... Talk about puns. This is definitely high up there on the list of super-geek plates. HTML (the hypertext markup language, you know, the language web pages are constructed with) can have METATAGS that instruct your browser to do certain things. Ok. In case you missed the pun, license plate ...

Ok, this one will need a little explaining. OSPF stands for "open shortest path first" and refers to a TCP/IP routing protocol that is used mostly within corporate networks where RIP (another routing protocol) just can't cut it.

Perl Hacker. Perl is an interpreted programming language that is used widely throughout the Internet. Its very cool. In case you are wondering, this nifty geek-plates site is generated by running a Perl script. :-)

One of the cooler plates I've seen. My friend Eugene has this plate. Now, if you've ever played the computer game Quake, you'd get this reference right away. If not, "quad damage" is a special privilege you can pick up during the game to deal out 4 ...

RAID, or redundent array of inexpensive disks, it a technology for using several hard drives together as a single unit for speed and redundency purposes. RAID level 5 is one of the more advanced configurations.

Under UNIX, if you log on as a normal user, you can't do some of the cooler things that the administrator can do. So, if the administrator wants to let normal users run certain programs that only an administrator could run, the programs can be marked as "setuid 0."

Kewl elite hackers often try to "spoof" network packets so that their attacks appear to be coming from different places. Spoofing is often used in denial of service attacks to mask the true source of the attack.

In the TCP/IP protocol, when you initiate a TCP connection (like a web request), your computer sends a "SYN" packet, the remote system sends an "ACK" packet, and then your computer sends a "SYN ACK" packet. You follow that? Good. There will be a quiz later.

This plate belongs to one of my co-workers. If you've seen the movie Wargames, I'm sure you are familiar with the art of war dialing: sweeping telephone number ranges in search for computers with modems.

In the early days of Windows systems (and I suppose its still true today) all programs that communited via TCP/IP used the "winsock" programming APIs. Don't ask me why anyone would ever want to put this on their license plate though.

Wooh there. Hold on. Don't tell me what I can and cannot XML! (XML refers to the eXtensible Markup Language. It is a meta-language that can be used to describe the syntax and format of other languages like HTML. Does that make sense? Didn't think so.)